Unreal Tournament is a fantastic arena shooter. If for some bizzare reason you have missed the original release, the Game of the Year Edition is a great place to pick it up, especially if you want a nicely wrapped package with great mods, maps, mutators, and skins. While it’s unfortunate that this edition fails to deliver anything truly new, the bundle is of very high quality.

Shoot at ammo boxes and they go kablooie.

One of the most interesting mods to enhance gameplay are Relics, ingenious little power-ups that grant various boosts when carried. The Relic of Speed, for example, ups your running performance by a lot (perfect for those CTF or Assault matches), while another, Ragen, incrementally boosts your health up to 150 points. Strength and Defense respectively increases weapon damage and absorbs damage from enemy fire. These power-ups are spawned randomly near Path Nodes (invisible waypoints used by the AI to navigate), and as such their placement ensures that bots and players alike take full advantage of them.

A few other clever modifications are also worth mentioning. For example you can set ammo packs to explode when shot, allowing you to play devious tricks on bots or unsuspecting human players who are just about to pick up ammunition boxes. The resulting fireworks and charred polygonal remains are hilarious. Team Beacon lets you spot your buddies easily to avoid friendly fire, while Chainsaw Melee replaces the boring old Impact Hammer with something far more sinister.

Maps are included for most game modes (Domination and Assault are notably neglected), but what’s already here is almost all high quality stuff. Beyond that there are a great number of skins – including Skarrj, Nalis and Nali War Cows – plus various bugfixes all around. The singlepalyer campaign game, alas, was not modified in any way from the original game.

Overall this is a great little enhancement for UT99, which is still enjoying a thriving modding community. There’s some notable cut content from the GoG version of UT GOTY for whatever reason (the ChaosUT mod has been left out), although the CD download linked herein contains everything that was featured upon its original release.